Following the February 2010 Supreme Court decision to force The Pirate Bay to be censored in Italy, the music industry is celebrating after police and prosecutors seized a site which circumvented the ban by offering proxy access to the Swedish torrent site.

In mid-2008, The Pirate Bay was censored in Italy after the country’s ISPs were ordered to block their subscribers from accessing the site.

The Pirate Bay effectively won their case on appeal after the Court of Bergamo ruled that no foreign website could be censored for alleged copyright infringement. The blockade was lifted, albeit temporarily.

In February 2010, however, the Supreme Court decided that ISPs could be forced to block BitTorrent sites, even those located outside the country and run by foreigners. So that was that, The Pirate Bay became officially unavailable in Italy after all ISPs blocked the site.

In a response to the first block in 2008, Peter Sunde said that a site had been set up called Labaia.org, through which Italians could continue to access The Pirate Bay. That site became non-operational a while back.

More recently another site appeared – Labaia.net (La Baia means ‘The Bay’ in Italian) – which offered the same function. That site has now been shut down by the Guardia di Finanza (GdF), an Italian police force with responsibility for dealing with cybercrime.

Although Labaia.org seemed connected to The Pirate Bay, Labaia.net appeared to be independent. TorrentFreak asked Giovanni Battista Gallus, one of The Pirate Bay’s Italian lawyers, if Labaia.net was mentioned in the blocking lawsuit.

“No it is not mentioned,” he told us. “But the original seizure regarded ‘all future domain names’ connected or linked with the original TPB IP address.”

However, what is unusual is that if anyone tries to access www.thepiratebay.org from an Italian ISP, all they get is a timeout, but anyone trying to access the Italian-hosted Labaia.net gets the message below. It seems that sites outside Italy are blocked, while those inside the country can be seized.

FIMI, the Italian Music Industry Federation, was quick to praise the closure and said the prosecutor and GdF seized the site to prevent the illicit spreading of copyright works.

In the meantime Italians continue to find ways around the blockade, either by using other torrent sites, such as BTjunkie, or unblocking portals such as PirateBayItalia.

This site offers a handful of techniques to access torrents, including a custom Google torrent search and access to The Pirate Bay via Google translate. Better put on a big pot of coffee, this cat and mouse game could go on indefinitely.

Update: TorrentFreak tracked down the operator of Labaia who told us that the police took all his hardware and took copies of the entire site and logs.

He also informed us that if he’d have been asked he would’ve closed the site, but unfortunately no warning was given whatsoever. He had no idea running a proxy would constitute a crime in Europe.